TY - JOUR
T1 - Analyzing open-source software systems as complex networks
AU - Zheng, Xiaolong
AU - Zeng, Daniel
AU - Li, Huiqian
AU - Wang, Feiyue
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the reviewers for the valuable comments.We would like to thank Liang Sun, Wei Cui, Feng Zhang, and Hong Mo, for useful discussions and helpful suggestions. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants. 60621001 and 60573078, by the Chinese Academy of Sciences through an international collaboration Grants 2F05NO1 and 2F07C01, and by the Ministry of Science and Technology under the 973 program Grants. 2006CB705500 and 2004CB318103. The second author wishes to acknowledge support from the U.S. National Science Foundation through Grants IIS-0527563 and IIS-0428241.
PY - 2008/10/15
Y1 - 2008/10/15
N2 - Software systems represent one of the most complex man-made artifacts. Understanding the structure of software systems can provide useful insights into software engineering efforts and can potentially help the development of complex system models applicable to other domains. In this paper, we analyze one of the most popular open-source Linux meta packages/distributions called the Gentoo Linux. In our analysis, we model software packages as nodes and dependencies among them as edges. Our empirical results show that the resulting Gentoo network cannot be easily explained by existing complex network models. This in turn motivates our research in developing two new network growth models in which a new node is connected to an old node with the probability that depends not only on the degree but also on the "age" of the old node. Through computational and empirical studies, we demonstrate that our models have better explanatory power than the existing ones. In an effort to further explore the properties of these new models, we also present some related analytical results.
AB - Software systems represent one of the most complex man-made artifacts. Understanding the structure of software systems can provide useful insights into software engineering efforts and can potentially help the development of complex system models applicable to other domains. In this paper, we analyze one of the most popular open-source Linux meta packages/distributions called the Gentoo Linux. In our analysis, we model software packages as nodes and dependencies among them as edges. Our empirical results show that the resulting Gentoo network cannot be easily explained by existing complex network models. This in turn motivates our research in developing two new network growth models in which a new node is connected to an old node with the probability that depends not only on the degree but also on the "age" of the old node. Through computational and empirical studies, we demonstrate that our models have better explanatory power than the existing ones. In an effort to further explore the properties of these new models, we also present some related analytical results.
KW - Complex networks
KW - Degree distribution
KW - Open-source software systems
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U2 - 10.1016/j.physa.2008.06.050
DO - 10.1016/j.physa.2008.06.050
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:49649092807
VL - 387
SP - 6190
EP - 6200
JO - Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
JF - Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
SN - 0378-4371
IS - 24
ER -